Literature, Life-Writing, and Identity

Introduction

While discussing her most recent novel, Refuge, on NPR’s “All Things Considered”, Dina Nayeri recalled a professor once telling her, “you can either have roots or wings, but if you try to have both, you're probably going to fail.” This metaphor of giving a child roots and wings is one I have heard from time to time throughout my teaching career. It wasn’t until I heard Nayeri’s words, however, that I considered how to balance the two. Parents help their children establish “roots” as a way of understanding their past while nurturing the growth of “wings” that will enable them to soar freely in the future. It is a beautiful metaphor to describe both the role of a parent and a child. For my tenth grade students, who recently immigrated to the United States, this metaphor is also a poignant reminder of how accelerated their growth into adulthood has become--leaving home not as a choice, but as the sole option for survival.

Is it really impossible to sustain both the nurturing of strong roots in our lives and planning pathways to the future? This is a notion that my newcomer students grapple with as they construct new lives in the United States. Coming from over 32 different countries around the globe, many of my students have endured the pain of severed roots through years of war or felt their roots slowly poisoned by the infiltration of gang violence.¹  These destructive forces have shaped many of my students’ early childhood experiences, yet they still carry with them the places and people they come from. When faced with a dilemma, I have witnessed my students draw upon their strong roots--nurtured in the richness of cultural values, family traditions, spiritual beliefs, and the languages of the places they call home to guide them. These roots often rise to the surface as my students navigate the new landscape their wings have taken them to in Oakland, California.

As recent immigrants, my students are continuously swaying between the past and the present while a future full of uncertainty hovers above them. When they first arrive, my students are immersed in newness; where they live, the people they see, what they eat, the language they hear and must now learn how to speak are all part of the present. Just a short time before, sometimes just a few weeks, they were living a completely different life in a different place that has now become part of the past. When the present quickly dissolves into the past, the uncertainty of the future raises questions that cannot be answered. Will I be allowed to stay in this country, in this apartment, in this school, in this job? I cannot help but wonder how this rapid change and often letting parts of themselves drift away impact my students’ perceptions of themselves. If everything is new how can they not feel confusion about their identity? Levine says, “Identities are never finally established; rather, they are always in the process of being constructed and reconstructed”.² This dilemma, coupled with changes and transitions that mark adolescence, causes me to wonder how I can guide my students to find that balance.

As a teacher of English Learners my responsibility is to immerse my students in reading, writing, listening, and speaking experiences to help them develop strong English communication skills as quickly as possible. The way I do this through my teaching practice is to integrate language activities into art-making using Art Based Research. Every class that I teach is rooted not only in a Visual Art content objective but also an English language objective. Through hands on art-making my students are building upon their experiences and growing individually as both verbal and visual communicators. Through this unit my students will read passages of immigrant narratives that are similar to their own experiences. While they read, students will identify the perspective each story is told from and practice writing about themselves in first, second, and third person point of view. Each point of view that students explore will also deepen their understanding and use of pronouns. Through careful reading and discussion students will also consider how time is described in the passages they read and write letters to themselves in the past, present, and future while strengthening knowledge of verb tense. Utilizing prior drawing and painting skills to illustrate their writing, students will examine how color, texture, and shape can tell stories visually. As a culminating project, students will first record themselves reading the three passages they wrote to their past, present, and future selves. After transferring their recordings to sound chips, students will imbed these chips into sculptural mobiles that will balance images, colors, textures, and shapes to tell the stories of each student.